The Oil Drum

I looked at the first chapter which is the online teaser. After reading that I wouldn't expect to find a serious analysis of anything to follow. If I had seen the book in the store last week and read that chapter, I would have put it down with a smile and walked to the fiction section to see if they have an English translation of Ransmayr's "The Last World". Now that is truly great fiction... (In reality I ended up buying a copy of Mark Twain's "Saint Joan of Arc" which promises a lot of entertainment and insight).

I guess I am simply too much of an engineer with science background to enjoy anything (allegedly) non-fictional that does not burst with data, models and falsifiable/verifiable math. As such I am much more interested in hybrid-sales and solar revenue growth as indicators of changes in consumer behaviour than sociological "analysis" of what is "wrong" with the world. As far as we know nothing is "wrong" with the world in the first place. It simply follows the laws of nature and the reactions we get from it are consequences of our own actions. The reactions are often predictable. The actions are often stupid. So the result of a sociological analysis would have to be that man continues to act stupid. There is nothing new about that. Mark Twain wrote two dozen books on that topic... I bet he would be very amused about PO and GW. And he certainly would write better about it than most anyone does today.

The real question I have (and no doomer has any answers to that) is WHEN will man be FORCED to act rationally by nature? We know that this is inevitable because people can only take so much punishment before they learn and the lessons we are facing will be hard ones. So while doomerism acknowledges that man is stupid, something I will never deny, it neglects that man can also learn. And the fact that we are here at all is my main witness for my case.

I am, by the way, not the first one to criticize the man, as this article shows:

http://www.homerdixon.com/download/Response_to_Gleditsch.pdf

Looks like to me that by the time these masters of sociology will be done with their debates about who made bigger mistakes describing the world, Toyota will have sold approx. 25 million hybrids and the world will get 5% of its energy from solar cells. The OLPC project will have distributed hundreds of millions of Linux devices to children in the developing world and many of these children will know more about computer science than most high school students in the US. What a beautiful world this will be... what a glorious time to be free. Not in Iraq, of course where we will celebrate five million deadths from the raging civil war...